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WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

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11–20 of 105 posts

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#11
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

There's no clear cut alternative CMS to use, that's the issue.

If you own a wordpress site for your business and you want to change your dev or agency then you will have no problems finding people who understand WP and can work on/fix your site. It might cost you but you'll have no issues finding people to work on it.

Use anything else and you'll be hunting down people who can and want to work on it.

The other major issue is, the paid plugin ecosystem is vast in wordpress and because of that many problems can be solved with a plugin. The conversation typically goes "If this were on wordpress we'd buy this plugin for $xx and we'd be done in a few days, but it's not so we can build it for $xxxx and it'll take at least 2 weeks."

Client hears that and ends up on wordpress next redesign.

Code quality ultimately doesn't matter to site owners so long as the site works.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#13
A lot of this seems to be change for change’s sake. Creating something non standard for anyone used to working with wordpress for no big benefit. The main benefit of wordpress is the compatibility and the number of people who know it inside out. To be honest it smells like a project by a bored agency wordpress dev who would rather eat their own head than code another custom theme so spent a few weeks throwing this up instead. Every big wordpress agency has devs like this.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#14
post #12

Wow, Wordpress still use MD5 hashes for passwords? That's really taking backward compatibility with old PHP versions too far! https://github.com/roots/wp-password-bcrypt#readme https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/21022

It's not about backwards compatibility. It's about sheer incompetence of the WordPress developers.

I have never seen such a badly coded mess.

I ask every downvoter to prove me wrong. I'm sure none of them have ever seen any piece of WordPress code (or documentation, or anything else).

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#15
post #9
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

There's much more to WordPress than the ecosystem. If we just think of it as a legacy tool that is only limping along because of the plugins, we will forever be perplexed that it continues to exist. WordPress is the FLOSS alternative to Wix et al. It is the only practical software that enables people to create and self-host an online presence without having to type a single line of code, and without being beholden to…

> Understand the users, on the other hand, build a good alternative, and that billion-dollar market might become yours.

Isn't that the entire point of Ghost?

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#16
post #9
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

There's much more to WordPress than the ecosystem. If we just think of it as a legacy tool that is only limping along because of the plugins, we will forever be perplexed that it continues to exist. WordPress is the FLOSS alternative to Wix et al. It is the only practical software that enables people to create and self-host an online presence without having to type a single line of code, and without being beholden to…

php's success is tightly connected with LAMP, namely apache mod_php and mysql/mariadb.

it wouldn't be hard to put together the base of wordpress in python on top of django. but hosting companies for decades cared only about mod_php and had no one click uwsgi/fastcgi solutions.

although this still doesnt answer why wordpress became king of the hill in the php ecosystem. was textpattern/drupal/joomla/etc that much worse/harder to use?

in the end wp just looked a tiny bit more professional and an easier name to remember for the masses. this technical dept will be paid for many years to come.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#17
post #5

I always wonder, at what point is it easier to just ditch Wordpress completely and instead spend the time to add an admin theme that looks & behaves like it for familiarity of users, and maybe add whatever magic functions your favorite framework might be missing. This isn't a critique, I use WP intensively, and we heavily modify and extend it as well, but the familiarity of the team (in dev, seo and content) is prett…

I think you answered your own question, the familiarity for users (seo & content) which is "end-to-end no-code" is massive (especially once extended with user-facing plugins). And you're not even speaking about making the move to Gutenberg yet. Just too much value there.

what familiarity? every single plugin's dashboard/admin page looks completely different.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#18
post #11
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

There's no clear cut alternative CMS to use, that's the issue. If you own a wordpress site for your business and you want to change your dev or agency then you will have no problems finding people who understand WP and can work on/fix your site. It might cost you but you'll have no issues finding people to work on it. Use anything else and you'll be hunting down people who can and want to work on it. The other major…

Except they dont. Leveraging 30 plugins makes the sites a constant hack target and perform piss poor in SEO page speed test, etc. That lets fix it with plugins attitude works for entry level sites, but if you actually are profitable and competitive its more trouble than hiring someone to build a lean site, even if using WordPress for content in the backend. Less is more.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#19
post #8
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

WordPress uses the PHP-mysqli extension. The PHP-mysql extension is unused since WordPress 3.9, quite some years ago. You might mean PHP-pdo is advised. Can you explain why it is better in this regard? Also $wpdb->prepare() uses parametrised values. Not everywhere in WordPress core is it being used. Most plugins use it for direct queries (not that common), but I don't know if the plugin team refuses plugins when they…

Read this article for a primer on why PDO is a vastly better choice: https://phpdelusions.net/pdo#why

And the fact that it’s 2023 and we’re somehow ok with the biggest web application there is not using parametrised queries in its core completely stumps me. Time and time again, SQL injection attacks in Wordpress or it’s plugins pop up. PDO with parametrised queries simply eliminates this issue.

Re: WordPlate: WordPress on Composer with sensible defaults

#20
post #10
post #6

Just reading this again gives me a backflash of the horrors of working with WordPress. If you haven’t seen the source, you don’t know just how god-awful the code is - and it just won’t die, because of all the ecosystem traction it has. Even the PHP developers have chosen to ignore WordPress in language evolution considerations, as the WordPress community refuses to do accept kind of progress for their project - they…

Why would you change a successful product just because the "language evolves"? PHP is so successful precisely because it lets all the legacy code live. To the contrary, with each PHP iteration, "bad code" is executed faster with fewer energy utilized.

It’s not because the language evolves - which it does - but because Wordpress is built on bad patterns, abuse of legacy features, and simply heaps upon heaps of bad code.

This leads to PHP itself having to make bad compromises for the future to keep the Wordpress code of millions of websites running; this leads to developers wasting time trying to accommodate Wordpress in plugins and themes; this leads to new developers growing up with bad standards and outdated practices.

I’m not complaining Wordpress doesn’t follow the latest trends or won’t add arrow functions everywhere. I’m complaining they actively block the way to the future, like a senile senator with lots of unmerited influence and decade-old opinions.

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